Culvert builds and runs the data foundation behind growing consumer brands. The numbers your team and your tools depend on come out right, reconciled and ready — not stitched together every Monday morning.
Who it's for
Consumer brands past the spreadsheet stage — growing fast enough that the questions have outgrown the tools answering them, but not ready to staff a data team. Where the numbers are everyone's problem and nobody's job.
§ 01The problem
AI is only as smart as the data underneath it.
The best tools in the world still give confident, wrong answers when they read from spreadsheets that disagree with each other. It usually shows up in four ways, and most brands have all four at once.
Sales reports one figure, the 3PL another, finance a third. Every meeting opens by arguing about whose number is right instead of what to do about it.
Reporting falls to whoever has time that week. It gets done — differently each time — and nobody is accountable for it being right.
“Case fill rate” means whatever the person who built the spreadsheet decided it meant. When they're out for a week, or gone for good, the definition goes with them.
Monday morning goes to exports and lookups. By the time the number arrives, the decision that needed it has already been made without it.
The hard part was never the dashboard. It is getting the data underneath to be correct, consistent and trusted. That is the part Culvert owns.
§ 02How it works
Sales, inventory, 3PL, retail and finance — wherever your data lives today. No rip-and-replace.
One maintained registry of what your products, customers and SKUs actually are, so every system and report is speaking about the same thing. This is the catalog everything else points back to, and the reason the numbers reconcile at all.
We reconcile the feeds and decide what the numbers actually mean, so "case fill rate" means the same thing everywhere. This is judgment, not just a connector.
Culvert builds, hosts and runs the foundation, so the reports are ready before you are. Your reconciled data and outputs stay portable — exportable on demand, no warehouse for you to stand up or maintain.
§ 03What it tells you
The questions operators actually need answered, without a person and a morning spent on exports.
What's likely to sell, and what's about to run out, before it does.
Exactly what you have, where it is, and when to reorder — by SKU and retailer.
Which orders you can actually ship, and which are exposed, weeks ahead.
OTIF, case fill and forecast accuracy — tracked the same way every week.
§ 04Vs. in-house
A data hire is the right move eventually. The real question isn't the salary — it's how long you keep making calls on numbers nobody can check, and what that costs while you wait.
| Dimension | In-house hire | Culvert |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a number you trust | Months — hire, onboard, then build from scratch | Weeks — a proven stack, adapted to you |
| What the wait costs | Every decision in between still runs on stitched-together exports | Reconciled numbers while you're still writing the job spec |
| CPG domain judgment | Depends entirely on who you find | Built by an operator who has run CPG ops |
| Continuity | Knowledge walks out the door with them | Documented and portable, not held by a person |
| Portability | Yours, but only they understand it | Reconciled data and models exportable on demand, fully documented |
| Dedicated, full-time focus | Yes — one person entirely on your business | Shared focus, scoped to what you need |
When you are ready for a full data team, the foundation Culvert builds is theirs to take over — documented, exportable, and already running. We make that handoff easy, not something to untangle.
§ 05Portability & continuity
Culvert hosts and runs the platform — your data stays portable. A clean, documented data model, with full export of your reconciled data and outputs on demand and on exit. No proprietary trap: you can take your modeled data and leave, whatever happens next.
A clean, documented data model, hosted and run by Culvert. Your reconciled data and outputs export in full whenever you ask — and if we ever part ways, you take your modeled data with you.
One modeled source of truth, with the logic visible and documented, so you can always trace where a number came from.
The same stack and discipline used to run operations inside a real, fast-scaling CPG brand. Not a demo.
§ 06Get in touch
Tell us what you're trying to see in your business. We'll show you how Culvert gets you there.
[email protected]